Sacred versus Secular

Sacred versus Profane

Among scholars, the sacred is understood either as (a) a sui generis quality of transcendence considered by religious adherents to be inherent in the way of things (that is, sacred as a foundational and irreducible quality of an experience or object), or (b) as a dynamic process or reaction expressed by religious adherents toward particular items, places, or times. It is often defined by its relationship to the profane, or that which is not sacred, and is marked or bounded in space and time and protected from the profane, which threatens its purity or power (be it process of product). Thus, the opposite of the sacred as understood by scholars is not the secular, but the profane.

Although the profane threatens the purity of the sacred even as it defines it, the secular challenges the concept of the sacred. In chronological terms, as long as there has been something sacred, there has been something profane, for the two are intimately related and, some scholars would argue, have no meaning each without the other. The concept of secular is not as old, and although the term may date back to the Middle Ages, its current conceptualization can be traced to the European Enlightenment and its roots in the scientific revolution of the Renaissance.

In their scholarly context, both terms represent the emergence of the academic and comparative study of religion as a humanistic pursuit separate from theology. Although all religions retain some aspect or element that might be readily identified as sacred, as a term used in the comparative study of religions, it is often traced to 19th-century European missionaries encountering non-Mediterranean-based religions in Africa and Australia, and their descriptions of the powers considered to emanate from items or spaces by adherents of local, small-scale religious traditions.

Describing the Sacred

The two main schools of thought that emerged in the conceptualization of the sacred are often traced to Rudolf Otto and Émile Durkheim. Otto, writing in the early decades of the 20th century, postulated that an experience with the sacred (he used the term holy) was both real and yet ineffable (“wholly other”). In his classic work, Das Heilige (translated as The Idea of the Holy), after analyzing a typical religious adherent's encounter with the sacred (creeping flesh, fear, amazement), he even cautions readers who have not had such an experience to read no further, dramatizing the point that the experience is so unique that those who have not had it will be unable to comprehend his discussion that follows.

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